‘In which language shall I tell my story? In Turkish, Dutch or Kurdish?’ These are the opening words of the film Qanok (director’s first cut, 2012) by Seyit Battal Kurt (Toprakkale, 1978): a film about the landscape of his youth. Now, twenty years later he returns to Toprakkale, the village of his youth in the extreme eastern part of Turkey, near the border with Armenia and Iran. During his stay there, he reflects upon his life. In this way, a personal, autobiographical narrative slowly unfolds. It is the story of a migrant, of children of immigrant workers, and also of the position of the Kurdish population.

With the exhibition entitled In which language shall I tell my tale?, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam brings together ten artists from Turkey and the Netherlands who recount their stories with themes such as identity, origins, migration, changing social structures, perception of time as a measurable phenomenon, and dreams of a better future. What drew attention during the interviews with these artists was that they all managed to articulate their tales in an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful way. They fuel narrative imagery with their expressive work; they reveal to us a whole new world.

The story as a medium

Telling stories is a universal phenomenon. The Persian culture and our own traditions based upon ancient Greek and Roman culture comprise a number of classical and imaginative stories, such as One Thousand-and-One Nights and The Iliad and The Odyssey. In their own era, these stories had not only an entertaining function but also served to dispel anxieties or to bring order to a chaotic world. Even today, the narrative is regarded as an important medium. Talking about our personal lives helps us construct our identity and thus define our personality. The Dutch-Turkish artist Kurt also attempted to reconstruct his life story in his film Qanok, in order to give his existence in two worlds some kind of certainty, significance and direction.

Stories also have a normative character. This is still the power and the merit of stories. They contain pieces of wisdom about life, they have an educational function, or pass on prevailing values and norms. In the animated video entitled Ibretnüma (2009), which means ‘exemplary’ in English, CANAN (Istanbul, 1970) builds upon this fact. Her work is based upon folktales and refers to the narratives in One Thousand-and-One Nights. The mother of the young beauty Fadike arranges a marriage for her daughter and Fadike moves from the countryside to the city of Istanbul. Her life is determined by the edifying existential lessons of her mother and by the growing popular media culture that propagates a specific feminine image. With this work, CANAN, who prefers to be known by only het first name in capitals, underlines the influence and power of structures, such as family, religion and the state, upon being a female in present-day society.

Humorous alternatives

In her work, Nilbar Güreş (Istanbul, 1977) also explores issues that are related to being a woman, but from a less strictly feminist approach. She questions the traditional role patterns and sketches humorous alternatives. In the video loop Wolf and Lamb, two children are playing in the fading twilight. The boy is wearing a wolf mask, the girl a lamb’s mask. The boy howls like a wolf as he chases the bleating lamb. The seemingly innocent game is ominous at the same time. Until the whole suddenly takes an amusing turn. It is no longer clear who is chasing whom and who is imitating which sounds. Role patterns are breached in the heat of the game.

Şükran Moral (Terme, 1962) acquired fame primarily with her controversial performances in which she, too, questions traditional role patterns. Accordingly, in the film registration Brothel (1997), we see Moral herself, scantily clad in the door opening of a brothel in the Istanbul quarter of Yuksekkaldirim. Here, prostitution generally takes place behind closed doors. For this reason, dozens of mainly male passers-by look at her surprisedly and disapprovingly – in addition to lecherously. On the door there is a sign: Museum of Modern Art, by means of which Moral draws a comparison between, on the one hand, viewing and absorbing images in a museum and, on the other, the objectification of the woman as a user object and merchandise within prostitution.

In Married, with three men (2010) we are witness to Moral’s marriage ceremony with three pristine young men in a traditional village in south-east Turkey. Although polygamy is forbidden according to Turkish law, it still occurs frequently, says Moral. She gives rise to many controversies with her performances. With her themes – such as prostitution and the unequal relationships between men and women – she not only stimulates discussion within the art world, but also opens the debate within local communities and in the national press.

Avant-gardist visual language

For years, Mehmet Güleryüz (Istanbul, 1938) has been an exemplary figure in the development of present-day art in Turkey. From the sixties onward, when drawing was still an undervalued genre in Turkey, he manifested himself with his marvellous draughtsmanship. His works consist of concealed political comments, reflections on inter-personal relationships, and sexuality. His drawing diaries exhibit an inexhaustible urge to consistently approach the medium in a new way. His dynamic and sketch-like signature entices the eye to follow individual lines, and thus to re-experience the drawing process and to incorporate the intimate universe of the drawing.

Yildiz Moran Arun (Istanbul, 1932-1995) is regarded as one of the avant-garde, just like Güleryüz. In the fifties, when being an artist was certainly no feminine vocation and art photography had much ground to make up in Turkey, she travelled with her camera throughout the country. She captured poetic images in, above all, Istanbul and Anatolia: a man drinking tea between enormous stacks of baskets, a girl embroidering a floral pattern in deepest concentration. Arun’s pictures radiate sympathy for the individual and an acute eye for the poetry of everyday scenes. After 1962, Arun shifted her attention entirely to maternity. Last year, for the first time in a very long period, her work was shown at the twelfth Istanbul Biennial (2012). The Stedelijk Museum Schiedam is proud to be the first institution in the Netherlands to display Arun’s work in the Netherlands.

The personal, the past and the future

Ahmet Polat (Roosendaal, 1978) is the son of a Turkish father and a Dutch mother. After graduating from the St. Joost Academie in Breda in 2000, he worked as a freelance photo journalist. He soon pointed his camera at his own projects in which he explored prejudices, notions of identity, and the dynamics within and between communities. Traces is a study project on the Afro-Turkish community. Little is known of this minority group, which arose in the era of Ottoman slavery. Since 2005, Polat has been traversing Turkey, seeking the personal stories behind this minority group, which, just like his own cultural background, is rooted in two cultures. With these photos he attempts to rescue this history from oblivion. In this way, Polat gradually gives shape to a complex history and to a cultural minority that had almost vanished from view.

The conceptual work of Cevdet Erek (Istanbul, 1974) often originates from personal narratives, too. In his Rulers and Rhythm Studies (2007-2011), consisting of sixteen rulers, he records personal, historical or miscellaneous perceptions of time. For Father’s Timeline (2007) for example, Erek asked his father to recount the story of his life. The result is a ruler on which years of political and personal occurrences alternate with one another. He also created a ruler on which the alternation between days (white) and nights (black) has been visualized. And there is a ruler that changes from the Ottoman Turkish alphabet to Latin script in 1928, when the reforms of Kemal Atatürk were implemented.

In the video loop The Road to Tate Modern (2003), by Erkan Özgen (Derik, 1971) and Şener Özmen (Idil, 1971), two men, one on a horse and the other on a donkey, meander through the dry Anatolian mountain landscape. Having arrived at a river, and seeking the continuation of the route, they see someone approaching at a distance. Will he be able to tell them the way to the Tate Modern in London?